The Utah women’s basketball team was forced to change hotels last Friday after experiencing what coach Lynne Roberts said was a series of “racial hate crimes” ahead of their first-round NCAA tournament game.
Following the team’s second-round loss to Gonzaga, Roberts told reporters about the incidents but did not go into detail.
Early on Tuesday, KSL.com reported that the N-word was yelled at members of the basketball team, as well as those part of the traveling party, which included cheerleaders and the school band. This reportedly happened multiple times as they were walking to and from a restaurant near their hotel.
Originally, the team was located in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho – more than 30 miles east of the McCarthey Athletic Center in Spokane. Both the NCAA and Gonzaga, the host school, helped the team relocate to a hotel in Spokane for the remainder of their stay.
“We all just were in shock, and we looked at each other like, did we just hear that? … Everybody was in shock — our cheerleaders, our students that were in that area that heard it clearly were just frozen,” Utah deputy athletics director Charmelle Green, who is Black, told KSL.com of the initial incident. “We kept walking, just…
